[I]t was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that high-volume international trading seriously resumed, with trade in wool one of its major drivers. In those centuries, the Port of London alone handled almost a thousand arriving and departing trading vessels a year, and numerous other English ports (including the newly active ports of Dover and Southampton) were claiming a role. Half this activity was devoted to wool, and it generated immense wealth for the realm, conferring fortunes on a small and monopolistic group of men. These successful profiteers were not the sheepherders and shearers of the provinces, nor the merchant sailors who braved the seas, but the entrepreneurial middlemen who collected revenues on exported wool. A close-knit group of at most several hundred men, they formed allegiances and confederations throughout the mercantile establishment that dominated the leading guilds and ran the city of London.

Knowing a good thing when they saw it, these wool merchants secured their privileges by means of favorable arrangements with select European markets, cities with which they concluded binding and mutually profitable arrangements to defend their trading rights. They came to be known as the Staplers, as a consequence of their conservative and self-interested policies. "Staple," based on estaple--the Old French word for a marketplace or an emporium--epitomized their principal stratagem of forming treaty-based relations with a European trading center and insisting on exclusive dealings.

Of course, the tumultuous and rapidly evolving economic scene of the later Middle Ages opened the door to more than one philosophy of trade. While the conservative wool men abided by the Staple, another and more activist cohort of traders, dealing in cloth and finished wool, was also operating out of London and a hodgepodge of smaller English ports. By the fifteenth century, these merchants had organized and given themselves a name: the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Their chosen name said a great deal about them. The early Merchant Adventurers spurned settled arrangements in favor of new horizons. Unlike their Stapler peers, they preferred far-flung destinations, flexible arrangements, and speculative deals. Their ranks were open to a wide range of aspiring traders and manufacturers with eyes on international markets and products to sell, including mercers (vendors of finished cloth), drapers, haberdashers, and skinners or furriers. Their "adventure" was not so much derring-do or thrill seeking for its own sake but (in the sense of the phrase venture capitalist as we use it today) a readiness to confront economic risk, a preparedness to stake their own capital in the pursuit of profit. Economic historian E.M. Carus-Wilson captured the difference between the two groups when she wrote, "The Adventurer, unlike the Stapler, who went regularly to and fro between England and the English port of Calais, voyaged far afield, east, west, north, or south, wherever he could find an opening."

  

The dour Staplers and the more rakish Adventurers and everybody in between were swept into discussions of the risks and rewards of international trade. Their concerns were advanced by English authors and poets who talked and wrote avidly about their scorn for international rivals; their approval of sporadic acts of mayhem directed against foreign competitors; their disapproval of sharp practice; the excitement and even romantic allure of their goods; the convergence of their own interests with those of their emerging nation-state. Participants in the discussion included Geoffrey Chaucer (who spent fourteen years as controller of the wool custom in the Port of London and whose father was a successful international wine trader) and the gentleman lawyer John Gower, his friend and poetic rival. Joining them were other canny observers of this emergent scene: city chroniclers, geographers, even a budding political economist who composed one of the earliest tracts written in English on the subject of commerce, essentially an "England First" manifesto in Chaucerian verse.